Outsourcing the Practice to Focus on Marketing

I outsource the practice of law and focus on the coding. I hire unemployed young lawyers to go to court to handle DUIs and criminal cases for a $100 a court appearance. I refer a lot of other things out, and I keep high value tort cases for myself.

My day is spent at the office advertising/coding, answering the phone for new business, and doing client intakes. Court is a distraction from advertising.

I don’t even know where to start pointing out all the problems with this. It’s like building a law practice in a minefield and inviting your clients over for a daily game of lawn darts. This commenter is either trolling for curmudgeons or the poster boy (or girl) for all of Scott Greenfield’s worst fears about today’s young lawyers.

Sam Glover has been writing about technology, law practice management, marketing, and other stuff on Lawyerist since he started it in 2007. He also writes about productivity hacks at Most Important Tasks and occasionally updates his personal blog. Follow him on Twitter: @samglover or email him at sam@lawyerist.com.

It’s the new law practice BARs are allowing to do. Besides, the new law is: earn as much money as u can. With this maxima in the head, what are u surprising about ? Been a lawyer is not the end, is a way to be rich.

William

Some areas of law lend themselves to being farmed out like this. Once you get the leads coming in and a system for dealing with client files, you can throw bodies at them. You see this often in landlord-tenant courts in NYC, and cheapo Chapter 7 mills operate like this. These areas of law are generally well-established. These firms charge a fixed fee for each case, build a huge volume of cases, then churn them through with per diem attorneys. Difficult cases get handed to “real” attorneys while the other guys just show up and collect a paycheck.

http://lawyerist.com/author/samglover/ Sam Glover

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Debt collection litigation often works this way, too, only instead of paying for incompetent court appearances, the debt collectors pay for incompetent signatures. It just so happens that robo-signing is illegal, but that doesn’t stop the debt collectors, just like those silly ethical obligations apparently don’t stop some lawyers from phoning it in.

William

*shrugs* I’m not condoning the practice; just reporting from the field.

http://blog.simplejustice.us shg

Sadly true. There was nothing about this scheme that doesn’t actually happen.

Bruce Godfrey

My money’s on the trolling.

http://adamlillylaw.com/ Adam Lilly

I applaud Creative Troll. Three of the curmudgeons probably had heart attacks upon reading that.

http://blog.simplejustice.us shg

Don’t you wish you were that witty? And if it had been real, don’t you wish you were sufficiently ethical that you would have had a heart attack too?

Creative Troll

I’m the guy who wrote the comment. I admit it was a joke post to get a rise out of the curmudgeons, but they haven’t taken the bait. Neither did Sam, who rightly figured out that I was just trolling.

You realize why this joke business plan wouldn’t work? If the client is unhappy with the results of his case, he’ll come to your office livid that you handed him off to a run lawyer. On the other hand, if the client is ecstatic about the results of his case, he’ll take the run lawyer’s card and call the run lawyer for all future matters. After a while, the run lawyer won’t need to run for $100 because he will have all of your clients. So it would be a lose lose proposition. LOL.

http://lawyerist.com/author/samglover/ Sam Glover

I that case, well played, Mr. Troll.

http://blog.simplejustice.us shg

I would like to say I saw through it, but that would be total BS. You had me, and I was just trying to draw you out to find out who you were so I could rip your lungs out.

Well done. I tip my old man fedora to you.

Bruce Godfrey

This trolling was pretty well done. Had it been just a little less ambitious, it would have worked.

If you’d like to see the results of oursourcing the practice of law, here are two cases for your perusal from Maryland. I don’t know if the links will work but cut and paste should work.